VISUAL ARTS
06.17.09
VISUAL ARTS, 20th-Century & Beyond, Social Realism
Kehinde Wiley By M.I.A He's a brilliant renaissance technician with hip-hop subject matter. His latest work focuses on young black men in a sadly familiar posture: Down. But in a world where bad is good, being down is not always such a bad thing. The public perception of black male youth has arguably changed since artist Kehinde Wiley began painting his formal portraits while in residency at New York's Studio Museum in Harlem in 2000. Part of Wiley's process was lifting his subjects straight from the street and rendering them-complete with sneakers, track pants, tank tops, and team caps-in the visual language of classic European portraiture; the result wasn't so much brashly iconoclastic as brilliantly inclusive, a mash-up of museum treasure
